The Sum of All Heresies: The Image of Islam in Western Thought

To emphasize the importance of the presidential speech, I gave him a cover photo of a stern-faced President Eisenhower at a microphone. Much of my work in African history, social anthropology, and francophone African literature touched on Islamic themes. Smith, whose seminal work was on the Hausa and other peoples of northern Nigeria, was a presence in the anthropology department, and Hasan El-Nouty, a Sorbonnetrained Egyptian, specialized in Arabic literature in translation and in third world authors of francophone expression.

Courtly and charming in personal behavior, von Grunebaum was elusive and spent much of his time abroad, recruiting faculty and students from all over the world in what was the high noon of the geographic area studies programs of the Kennedy era. I do not recall that Islam was ever a priority issue in any of the embassies where I served in Africa: Morocco — , Upper Volta — , or Cameroon — A Personal Statement Is the glass half full or half empty?

Are East—West and Muslim—Christian relations better now, or worse? Destructive forces are not lacking on all sides. I read enough of the history of his life written by Muslims and non-Muslims [to know] that he was a violent man, a man of war. But the wider picture on both sides is more positive than barrages of verbally propelled rockets suggest. A modest growth is recorded in the number of American students learning Arabic, Dari, Farsi, and other languages of the Islamic world.

At the local level, many college Middle Eastern or Islamic centers send speakers and media materials to high schools throughout their states and hold informative workshops for high school teachers. The twentieth century produced an emerging generation of scholars like W. Gibb—the list easily could be doubled. In short, more accurate information on Islam gradually emerged as did more balanced artistic, political, and religious voices.

But if the forces of mistrust and hatred were present on both sides, so were voices for greater tolerance, understanding, and inclusivity. Historians do not predict the future, but people of faith from the Abrahamic traditions remain steadfast in hope. This page intentionally left blank 1 The Prophet as Antichrist and Arab Lucifer Early Times to This book is neither a traditional political history nor a history of Muslim—Christian relations. Its focus is on the image of Islam prevalent in the West from the Middle Ages to the present; it examines how and why it has changed, as well as the extent to which it has changed.

Such a study is important because the West must deal with Islam as a growing political, social, and religious reality. For some people, a major concept in global politics is the supposed interchangeability of Islam and terrorism, triggered by the tragic events of September 11, , and by the recent war in Iraq and its increasingly negative consequences among Middle Eastern countries. And at a local level, the corner shop once run by a Jewish or Korean merchant is now the property of an Urdu-speaking owner who sells the Koran alongside newspapers and doughnuts.

Store clerks may converse in Arabic or another Middle Eastern language, and the on-call physician at a southern Maryland hospital may originally be a Farsi speaker. In communities across America the religious skyline now contains mosques, in addition to churches and synagogues, symbols of earlier established religions.

I knew that my God was a real God, and his was an idol. The possibilities of excerpting such sensationalist quotes about Islam from political and church leaders are numerous. In short, the worldview we have of Islam has been rarely examined and remains implicit in ongoing games of world politics. Some stirred-up Muslims or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the cold war? The fault lines between civilizations will be the battle lines of the future.

There was no clash of civilizations because there were no civilizations to clash in the sense that proponents of the argument employed. Nations, empires, and smaller ethnic, political, and religious groups of all sizes and orientations clashed. The old dualisms were revived. Western wealth passed into Eastern countries to be monopolized by a few wealthy families, and Western governmental institutions, such as presidencies and parliaments, were imported in name only into former colonies, generally resulting in tyrannies.

He ended with a cautionary note: And 20 the sum of all heresies in the meantime we must take great care on all sides to avoid the danger of a new era of religious wars, arising from the exacerbation of differences and the revival of ancient prejudices. Passionately argued, they contained both original insights and problems. Said carpet-bombed opponents, and his use of chronology was, at times, nonexistent.

A British historian of imperialism, John M. It becomes a generalized concept inadequately rooted in the imperial facts, lacking historical dynamic, innocent of imperial theory or of the complexities of different forms of imperialism. Bulliet, a historian of the Middle East, has pointed out, the Orient of the West, as depicted by Said, was not the Orient most Americans knew. Those the prophet as antichrist early times to 21 who were at all familiar with the Orient often learned about it through the charitable, educational, and humanitarian work of American missionaries.

Additionally, in the post-World War II period most Americans sided with occupied people, not the colonial powers, in their drive for independence. Said represented a creative intelligence, able to fashion the argument in a new context, even when its factual details were bent out of shape. Lewis, a painstaking scholar in the Ottoman Turkish archives and lapidarian interpreter of the Arab past, sometimes appeared to be a clumsy analyst of the political present, when he employed a view of the encounter of civilizations like that most famously used by Toynbee, long after historians had abandoned such an analytical framework because of its inadequacies.

But this implies that at another time things were going right, that there was some agreed-upon normative civilization that was the marker by which all others could be judged. Additionally, when emerging Middle Eastern states of the last century were looking at European models of state structures, some of the most readily available examples were the deeply authoritarian states of fascist Spain, Italy, and Germany, and communist Russia—not what Western democratic leaders would recommend as democratic examples. Sayyid Qutb, the Egyptian intellectual who lived in the 22 the sum of all heresies United States from to , returned to Egypt convinced Islam was the preferred path to the future.

He was later followed by the Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran and numerous other independent Islamic interpreters in countries as diverse as Turkey, India, Pakistan, Malaysia, and Indonesia. The list is long, and the Islamic and Western interpretations of history are diverse, but it remains a distortion, and not a helpful distinction, to reduce the basic elements of the encounter to a vague generalization like a clash of civilizations.

A wider picture has emerged of contact across the centuries. Its origins may be discerned three centuries earlier. Internal Islam contains the generally unexamined images we have accumulated since childhood—of fearful strangers, curious foreigners, exotic distant countries, and hostile religions whose believers we regard as inferior to us. They represent a deformation of our known values, if not an evil presence. The manipulation of fear is an ancient political weapon. From the Middle Ages on, travelers, traders, diplomats and scholars amassed ever more details the prophet as antichrist early times to 23 about the Islamic world.

But basic Western images of Islam changed little across these centuries as new information emerged. Why is that so? Probably because every society creates some picture of other more distant people to satisfy its own domestic constituencies. Thus the structures, symbols, and images of strangers are seen through a prism of our own invention for our own purposes.

From such a perspective, until recent times Muslims or Jews were not the subjects or objects of truly independent study in the Western world. For most Europeans, Islam arrived with invading armies from the East and remained a threatening force for several centuries. It is an ancient human strategy to attack the distant enemy in order to consolidate political control at home.

Portraying Jews and Muslims as heretics and sexual deviants allowed Europeans in positions of religious and political power to close their ranks. The West is an idea that inhabits us, as surely as does its opposite. McCarthy that created a state of fear in domestic politics. The creation of a threatening picture of the distant Russian enemy allowed politicians to manipulate the public and potential opponents and rally support at home.

External Islam External Islam is more readily understandable through history, political science, anthropology, and the media.

1. 4 editions of this work?
2. The Sum of All Heresies: The Image of Islam in Western Thought - Frederick Quinn - Google Books.
3. Stellt Anna Labzina sich in ihren Memoiren „Days of a Russian Noblewoman“ als unterdrückte Frau dar? (German Edition).
4. ALA User Menu.
5. Subscriber Login.

It is a world about which increasing demographic, geographic, and linguistic information—the products of virtually every known scholarly domain—become available. We would like to say that as more accurate information emerges, a more balanced picture of Islamic realities and aspirations comes into focus. But that is not always the case. What gradually crystallized were four somewhat different and at times contradictory models that, with variations, continue to the present. But not a pushover. Possibly that had been so since earliest times, but clearly such imagery of the Eastern enemy at the gates existed in Greek and Roman times, and was alive in the early Middle Ages.

The Greeks had created a self-image in relation to the Asian peoples on their frontiers, such as the invading Persians. In one account, during a battle against the Goths at Adrianople in the Romans had employed Arab mercenaries: No clear distinction was yet made among outlying Eastern ethnic, linguistic, and religious groups. By the time of the Crusades the distant military and religious enemies in the East would be called Ishmaelites, Hagarenes, and Saracens. Ishmaelites and Hagarenes represented the less-favored offspring of the patriarch Abraham, male sons by Hagar, an Egyptian slave girl.

The Oxford medievalist Richard Southern has described a world where Western writers knew little about Islam. There is no sign that anyone in Northern Europe had ever heard of the name of Mahomet. Matthew later elaborated on Daniel in a central New Testament passage Further confusion would come from the appearance of false prophets and messiahs cleverly resembling Christ: Here is the Messiah! For false messiahs and false prophets will appear and produce great signs and omens, to lead astray, if possible even the elect.

Take note, I have told you beforehand. Wherever the corpse is, there the vultures will gather. Muhammad, the letters of whose name, by numerological analysis, added up to , the sign of the Antichrist, was targeted with that name. Other biblical accounts added to the evidence against Islam. Survivors of this deluge were divided into three distinct groups. Shem, the second son, claimed Asia, the land of the Semites, an inferior people despite having produced Christ and the Hebrew prophets.

Ham, the African and servant of the other two, was relegated to last place. This three-pronged distinction provided a rationale for the development of human civilizations. A Balance Sheet of Positives and Negatives on Islam When Islam appeared as a bewildering new political and religious reality, it was easy to give it the inferior status of those who came before from the lands east of Eden.

Not all news from the East was negative, though. By the early eighth century, Muslim armies occupied parts of Spain, 28 the sum of all heresies North Africa, the Arabian Peninsula, Persia, and large parts of northern India. By the s, the Balkans and south-central Europe were subject to Muslim invasions.

This was the end time toward which the Book of Revelation pointed; the numbers of beasts and their various claws and horns were all linked to fallen historical creatures. Among the early writers, Theodore Abu Qurrah d. In On True Religion he presented a traditional Christian doctrine of creation and the development of history through Christian eyes, yet he allowed for the political success of its Muslim opponents. Then, using Muslim theological language, he asserted that basic Islamic beliefs were wrong.

He was a magician who could rise in the air, and following his death, according to widespread reports, his tomb levitated from a series of cleverly hidden magnets. Many Christians including those who had been conquered converted to this expanding Eastern religion, usually to improve their prospects; they found that employment, wives, and wealth would never have been achieved otherwise. Jean de Joinville, who accompanied Louis, described the meeting: I had drawn the man aside and asked him to tell me his circumstances.

Every day someone or other would say to me: I gave him much good Christian advice, but all to little effect. So he had left me, and I never saw him again. Completed in , this third holiest place for Muslims was where Muhammad was believed to have begun his night journey to heaven.

Consider under what conditions we live. We have been driven to this by our sins, to be subjected to the rule of the pagans. Only one cause of solace is left to us, that in the depths of such a great calamity they do not forbid us to practice our faith. For the time being, then, we keep the following counsel: How could so many Spanish Christian commentators hold on to such inadequate information when they lived in the midst of an active and generally tolerant Islamic population? Such questions would not occur to most Spanish monks of that era.

In a setting where dialogue was not a considered possibility, the only alternatives some Christian zealots understood were conversion or martyrdom. Such sharp-edged encounters that ended badly were an increasing feature of contact between the two faith traditions. A Muslim—Christian theological discussion had gone terribly wrong in Cordova for an aggressive Christian priest, Perfectus.

Some Muslims outside a local church had asked him what he thought about Jesus and Muhammad. Jesus was the Son of God, Perfectus answered, and Muhammad was a false prophet possessed of demonic illusions, a sorcerer who led a lascivious lifestyle. In response, the monk turned up the volume on his accusers and received a death sentence.

These Cordovan martyrs, who deliberately sought confrontation and death, were a problem for more cautious Spanish bishops, most of whom walked a delicate line in their multicultural dioceses. It was a place of tolerant interaction and sharp religious divisions, a case study in how Muslims, Jews, and Christians initially could live together, but Castilian authorities the prophet as antichrist early times to 31 reneged on earlier agreements that had allowed Muslims to live and practice their faith.

Starvation, mass murders, seizures of homes and goods, and expulsions from long-settled lands were daily occurrences. Why should we seek to preserve ourselves? Wife, I tell you that since we have no friend to take pity on our misfortunes and to put them to rights, I prefer to wait for an enemy who covets our goods and who will kill me, so as to be spared seeing the sufferings of my people.

I would rather die here by steel [ ferro] than later in shackles [ ferros]. Neither Jewish converts converses nor Muslims Moriscos were ever fully trusted, and in Pope Sixtus IV appointed a Dominican inquisitor to purge Aragon and Castile of undesirable elements. Then in Isabella ordered all Muslims in the two kingdoms to convert to Christianity. Her husband, Ferdinand, temporarily stood by his coronation oath to protect the religious liberty of his Muslim subjects, representing possibly 30 percent of the population, but soon the Inquisition triumphed and the once-delicate balance of competing but complementary cultures was no more.

Not only in Spain but also in numerous other places around the Mediterranean, Muslims, Jews, and Christians lived in intricate proximity. Mark Mazower wrote about the interaction of the three faith-based communities in Salonica, but his comments could have applied to Spain as well. The Moros y Cristianos spectacles were even carried by the Spanish conquerors to the New World and presented as demonstrations of victorious Catholic Christianity over pagan opponents.

Rid the sanctuary of God of the unbelievers, expel the thieves and lead back the faithful. When a delegation from the Byzantine church appeared and asked for his help in expelling Muslims from their lands, it gave Urban the excuse he needed to launch a crusade. Such a venture had several attractions: No immediate casus belli was on the horizon. Muslims had actually occupied Jerusalem for approximately four hundred years and, despite periodic friction, Muslims and Christians had peacefully coexisted there, much as they had in the Mediterranean basin.

Christian pilgrims, he said, were forced to vomit or void their stomachs and intestinal tracts for any hidden gold or silver, or have their stomachs ripped open. It is not that such negative images of Muslims did not already exist; they were easily available in the writings of earlier Western theologians, and in this Urban invented nothing new. Clerics, kings, epic poets and storytellers exercised free rein to spread bizarre tales about the Prophet, his religion, and the Middle East; nearly a millennium later their Western counterparts often draw on similarly incomplete material to express their own root images of Islam.

The picture was brilliantly clear, but its knowledge, and its details were only accidentally true. Its authors luxuriated in the ignorance of triumphant imagination. Codes of chivalry were highly developed in Islamic warfare, and Saladin, who could be cruel or generous as circumstances warranted, was presented increasingly in Western literature as the epitome of the chivalrous knight.

He supposedly traveled to Europe, and while in Paris was a guest at the French court. The queen of France fell for him, their theological discussions providing a verbal foreplay to their amorous trysts. An adroit diplomat, Frederick was in contact with several Islamic leaders, including the sultan of Egypt, who sought to engage him in alliances against rivals, as Frederick similarly hoped to use the sultan as an ally.

Frederick launched his own crusade in , but never attempted a military conquest and settlement in the Holy Land. Instead, he 34 the sum of all heresies negotiated a ten-year truce with local Muslim rulers and an agreement to restore the largely abandoned city of Jerusalem and other towns to Christian hands, while allowing Muslims to worship at the Dome of the Rock. Married to Yolanda, daughter of the King of Jerusalem, he adroitly played Muslim rivals against one another, and visited Muslim and Christian holy sites as their self-proclaimed protector. But his cleverness did not work as planned; both sides suspected Frederick, and when he left the fortress bastion of Acre in May the inhabitants pelted him with dung and animal innards.

His domains thus included a sizable part of southern Italy, where he sponsored a garrison of Muslim mercenaries, skilled archers, and crossbowmen. Small, widely scattered communities of active Muslim traders, farmers, and craftspeople existed throughout southern Italy, Spain, and elsewhere along the extensive Mediterranean coast, largely interacting peacefully and in accommodating ways with their Christian counterparts.

Legal documents were often written in Latin, Greek, and Arabic. Muslim raiders, sometimes operating from garrison towns, seized Christian ships and raided freely for slaves. The aging Pope Gregory IX reigned — excommunicated Frederick in , although they later made up.

Such contact is now usual, but it was rare for most of human history. World Wars I and II are obvious recent examples, but the Turkish victory of Constantinople on May 29, , was another such event, sending shock waves across Christian Europe. The ancient rivalry of Latin and Greek Christendom, Rome versus Constantinople, was now overlaid with an even sharper Christian—Muslim divide, but one with less clear geographical boundaries. The Byzantine emperor was replaced by an equally powerful Turkish conqueror who soon exercised political, military, and commercial control in much of the Mediterranean and its surrounding lands.

Christians responded to the loss of Constantinople by employing the worldview and imagery of their time. For them, defeat came because of their sinfulness or that of their leaders, or because of a lack of faith by European Christians. Women were raped, the chronicles continued, and men were beheaded and their bowels were ripped open. Strong, handsome young men 36 the sum of all heresies were led off into slavery and forcibly converted to Islam.

The fall of Constantinople soon became a theme for traveling entertainers and popular ballad writers who were looking for materials to hold audiences in market squares and churchyards. In one such work, the Lamento di Constantinopoli, both pope and emperor were blamed for the loss of the Holy Land and Constantinople, and with it the massacre of over two hundred thousand persons. The thirty-nine-stanza lament ended with an appeal for repentance and a renewed effort to return Constantinople to Christian hands.

A year after the fall of Constantinople, Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy from to , organized an elaborate civic-religious pageant as a rallying cry against Ottoman advances in Europe and as a fundraiser for an antiTurkish crusade. His means was an elaborate Feast of the Pheasant held in Lille on February 17, The best artists and artisans available were drafted for the day-long spectacle. It began with a crowd pleasing jousting competition.

Next, important guests were led to an elaborate banquet that featured themed displays set on tables, including a replica of a small church with musicians inside, and a pie that contained twenty-eight playing musicians. On the high pillar stood a thinly veiled woman with Greek symbols on her diaphanous robe, representing Constantinople.

A live lion representing the Turkish menace was chained to the low pillar. And, should anyone miss the point, a placard stood in front of the lion: Next came a procession of jugglers, falconers, and musicians, led by a turbaned giant who entered the banquet hall with a battleaxe in one hand, leading an elephant with the other.

The Sum of All Heresies: The Image of Islam in Western Thought - Frederick Quinn - Google Книги

Finally, a richly decorated cooked pheasant was placed before Philip by members of the Order of the Golden Fleece. Pius began his drive with a lavish religious spectacle, the centerpiece of which was the embalmed head of St. Andrew, one of the original apostles. The relic had been rescued from Constantinople and brought to Rome in As a way of assuring roadside crowds, Pius granted a plenary remission of sins to all who gathered to witness its passage.

There the pope kissed the sacred relic and lifted it for the throng of palm-branch worshipers to see; the valley echoed with a sung Te Deum while red-robed cardinals processed forth to venerate the relic.

Main Content

More was now known about the geography of the Levant and the political, military, and social structures of local societies. Reviled in most places, but admired in others, Islam was becoming a more complicated reality in the West. Emerging Accounts of Islam Building on images inherited from antiquity, like those discussed above, numerous Western writers of the early and late Middle Ages contributed to the unfolding picture of Islam.

These were followed, at the end of an age, by Martin Luther, to whom Turks and popes were equally objects of scorn. Bishop Isidore of Seville ca. While still managing an active diocese, Isidore also compiled a history of the world, a dictionary, and a widely circulated book of Etymologies. Not an original thinker, Isidore was a steady cataloguer of the work of others. It is not for nothing that the Roman Catholic Church in designated Isidore the patron saint of the Internet and computer users.

Isidore wrote at a time when Islam expanded about him, but he never knew it as a separate reality. Most likely he thought little about it. By the sixth age, the era of the apostles Peter and Paul, heretics began spreading messages closely resembling traditional Christian beliefs. Islam represented such a heresy. His was an elaborate construction of sacred history, and at its borders intruding forces could be shoehorned into established categories that included pagans, heretics, and the Antichrist.

This was not an age when Christian authors attempted to understand Islam on its own terms, on the basis of its own sacred texts. No one thought to move beyond the Christian worldview of the plan of salvation; anything outside it was error or heresy, to be corrected by conversion or the sword.

John lived at a crossroads of Islamic—Christian contact, and his brief, unpolished arguments foreshadowed those of later critics of Islam. A theologian who wrote for Christians, not Muslims, John considered Islam not a new religion but a Christian heresy, the the prophet as antichrist early times to 39 religion of idolaters among whom a false prophet, Mamed, arose.

A corrupted Arian monk had exposed Mamed to Christian beliefs, but claimed God had given him unique revelations in the Koran. In the year of our Lord , two comets appeared around the sun, striking terror into all who saw them. One comet rose early and preceded the sun, while the other followed the setting sun at evening, seeming to portend awful calamity to east and west alike. Or else, since one comet was the precursor of day and the other of night, they indicated than mankind was menaced by evils at both times.

At this time, a swarm of Saracens ravaged Gaul with horrible slaughter; but after a brief interval in that country they paid the penalty of their wickedness. The Islamic invasions of Anatolia and of Christian lands in Sicily, Spain, and Italy triggered a few alarm bells for Bede, but in general the growing spread of Islam was not a subject of interest to even this most inquisitive mind of Latin Europe. Peter differed from his Catholic coreligionists by favoring persuasion rather than threats toward nonChristians. Additionally, Peter believed Sergius, a heretical monk, and some Jews colluded with Muhammad to create this new heresy.

His manner of argument was heavy-handed; he told Muslims that if they believed the Koran they must regard the Bible equally as a work of divine revelation. Then, in a baitand-switch move, he wrote that God had not revealed the Koran and Muhammad was not a prophet.

Peter initially presented his material in a charitable manner, convinced that a loving perspective informed his arguments. Francis — , their founder, set out for the Holy Land in intent on martyrdom, but was shipwrecked instead. A variety of Muslim rulers offered the Franciscans inducements, but the monks refused and were tortured and killed.

Franciscan preachers made no effort to shape their message for Muslim audiences, and there was no formula for regrouping and moving on once the the prophet as antichrist early times to 41 message was rejected. He opposed the Crusades—wars did not win converts, he argued. Missionaries should learn foreign languages and study other religions, all the better to assert the superiority of Christianity.

The scholarly Dominicans tried a somewhat different approach. Still others preached with modest success to the captive subjects of Christian rulers. For Aquinas, writing in the Summa contra Gentiles, Muhammad was not a comprehensive religious thinker, and issued only enough uncomplicated doctrinal statements to attract an average person. He cleverly mixed his teachings with folk fables and produced no miracles. Aquinas never dealt directly with the Islamic philosophy of the latter two writers, but saw the value of their methodological frameworks, which he employed—especially in presenting arguments for the oneness of God, the doctrinal construct that opened his Summa Theologiae.

It was Llull who, at a Ecumenical Council in , suggested a bold proposal to create schools for the study of Oriental languages, history, and beliefs in several cities such as Paris, Oxford, Bologna, and Salamanca. Once the dialogue was established, Llull believed, coercion was a perfectly acceptable next step.

On his third preaching trip to Tunisia in , Llull was stoned to death. Gradually, though, more information about Islam emerged, some of it from long-distance traders who, with little fanfare, made their way from ports such as Venice by boat, then by caravan. Maps of the East became available, as did the location of rivers, seas, and cities, and the sources of spices and other desirable commodities. Agricultural practices and local industries in Muslim lands were described by returning traders, and with them information on customs, such as hospitality for strangers, respect for the elderly, and the sequestering of women.

Fragmentary as they were, these works represented the faint emergence of fuller information on Islam. Martin Luther — was the leading Protestant theologian for whom the Turks and the pope were equally odious. Venice was the catalyst for East—West contact during much of this time, beginning in when two Italian merchants spirited the relics of the martyred St. Mark the Evangelist from Alexandria to Venice. Venetian envoys and merchants lived in or frequently visited cities of the Islamic Near East, whose merchants and political leaders in turn spent time in the island republic. Venice thrived on its Eastern trade, and its artists and artisans made constant use of Eastern themes until the mid-sixteenth century, by which time the major trade routes had moved elsewhere than the Mediterranean and the Ottoman military push toward Vienna resulted in growing Turkish unpopularity in Europe.

Mark or The Stoning of St. We must abandon this country, where in truth we are mistreated. They take our goods and want to pay for them in their own way; worse still, they say they never received the money, which is what the pasha did even though he devoured sequins, but he said he gave them to the Jew who served as our interpreter and who is now dead.

I must tell you that the caravan from Mecca arrived at Damascus, very poor compared to previous years, when it brought few spices that we could buy; but this year is even worse because the camels died during the outward journey for lack of water and during their return due to cold: Most of the lands south of the Danube came under Ottoman control, as did parts of the Mediterranean. This period illustration shows a triumphant Turk on horseback, with a child impaled on his spear, leading a chained European couple into captivity. Even after their defeat at Vienna, the Turks continued to provide the image of the threatening outsider.

The chaste pope does not take any wife and yet has all women. The Turk abuses and treats lasciviously all female persons, both secular and spiritual. Luther is just as bad for he entices monks and nuns out of their monasteries into false marriages. Foxe began and ended his account by equating papal and Muslim excesses.

Drawing mainly on New Testament sources, especially the Book of Revelation, Foxe mined the Bible for detailed imagery, equating its dreaded beast with Muhammad. Finally, a good, convincing battle against the Satanic Turks would be an excellent way for Christians to better learn of the Lord Jesus and his holy life and teachings. O eternal Lord God!

The Sum Of All Heresies: The Image Of Islam In Western Thought 2007

Miserably we have walked hitherto, like sons, not of Sarah, but of Hagar, and therefore these Turkish Hagarenes have risen up against us. We have plowed and tilled, but without thy heifer; and therefore this untidy ground of ours bringeth forth so many weeds. O Lord God of hosts, grant to the church strength and victory against the malicious fury of these Turks, Saracens, Tartarians, against Gog and Magog, and all the malignant rabble of Antichrist, enemies to thy Son Jesus, our Lord and Savior.

Relatively free of the doctrinal fretwork characteristic of his predecessors, Michel de Montaigne — made numerous references to Turkish history and customs in his widely circulated Essais Montaigne, a tolerant, skeptical Catholic, several times attacked superstition in religion, but did not single out Islam. The sultan habitually murdered potential rivals, and Montaigne cited this example of cruelty to condemn capital punishment in both Turkey and France.

The Amorous Turk, so prevalent elsewhere, did not interest Montaigne, who was one of a gradually growing number of authors who explored human nature in a wider-than-European context. His comments were as accurate as the sources from which he drew them, and he contributed to the relatively new way Islam was presented in the West. This illustration of the beheading of John the Baptist from the Gospel of Mark 6: Eventually this Vatican-controlled press was moved from Rome to Florence; later Napoleon ordered it moved to Paris to print propaganda edicts for his Egyptian expedition.

Literary Works Western literary works of the Middle Ages depicted Islam in a manner that differed little from what the theologians wrote, except they were more attuned the prophet as antichrist early times to 49 to popular audiences. Such works both provided lively entertainment and reinforced an uncomplicated doctrinal lesson—heretics and idolaters come to a bad end, not so faithful Christians. Cruel potentates dressed in rich silks and living in jewelbedecked palaces sent scimitar-wielding champions into battle, and always, despite the intensity of battle, the Christian won, by either killing or converting the Saracen.

Writers and entertainers wanted to tell stories that would attract listeners, the more fanciful the account the better. The Christlike Frankish knight Roland was aided by the Angel Gabriel in defeating pagan Muslims, whose statue of their god Muhammad was thrown into a ditch where pigs and dogs destroyed it.

Roland laid down his life for his cause early in the drama, and after a prolonged battle, victory went to the Frankish hero-king, Charlemagne. This good-against-evil canticle became a skillfully employed propaganda piece during the Crusades. Elsewhere, Muslims appeared in popular drama as carnival characters and the Prophet as a villain. In such works Saracens were depicted as pagans who worshiped Mahumet, Apollin, and Tervagant, the moon goddess.

Tervagant was often portrayed as a shrewish, overbearing Muslim comic character, providing ready laughs, and pagan Muslims were stock characters in the York and Chester mystery plays as well. What gradually emerged by the later thirteenth century were prospects of a less hostile relationship with Muslims voiced by writers like Wolfram von Eschenbach —? Eventually he appeared as a mysterious knight in Europe in search of his father and, without knowing it, battled his half-brother Parzival in mortal combat; this was an often-employed literary form for the Christian—Muslim confrontation.

Their son was Prester [Presbyter] John, who became the legendary just ruler of a mysterious kingdom hidden somewhere in distant Muslim lands. In Willehalm, a later long epic poem by the same author, Willehalm and his wife Gyburc, another beautiful convert from Islam, took issue with popular European views of the Crusades. Her plea for tolerance and humanity transcended religious differences and represented a remarkable early statement at variance with the unequivocal anti-Muslim language of the Crusades. The stage was set for the Christian to win, and the defeated Muslim to convert.

The religions were not equal in combat, nor were the warriors. Chaucer was expertly conversant with Arabic science, then making its way into England, and with astronomy and astrology; in he began a treatise on the astrolabe that displayed knowledge of Arabic sources, possibly gained during his travels to Spain. He also knew as much about Islamic beliefs as anyone of his time. Her father consented, but only if the sultan would convert to Christianity. In many stories, the exchange might have ended there, but for the sultan the agonizing choice presented no problem—he feigned conversion to gain a wife and a lucrative trading relationship.

Then the trouble started. She told her followers: But I make one vow to almighty God— 52 the sum of all heresies Sooner the life shall be torn from my breast Than from my heart the faith of Mahomet! Constance was placed in a small rudderless boat to travel the seas in exile until she reached Britain three years later.

Chaucer deftly made the Muslim— Christian encounter a negative one. His Syria was an uncivilized, barbarous place, peopled by treacherous, deceitful rulers who belonged to a false religion. Her marriage to a weak but well-situated King Alla successfully produced a male offspring who would become a Christian ruler of the nations. Langland also repeated a stock story about Muhammad—that he was once a Roman cardinal, a successful preacher to the Saracens, whom he converted in large numbers.

The other cardinals promised Muhammad he would be the next pope, but they elected someone else instead, so the angry Muhammad left to found his own heretical religion. Marlowe could have drawn on the nearly one hundred versions of the Tamburlaine story circulating in England. Of Mahomet he said: Well soldiers, Mahomet remains in hell. Muhammad was relegated to the dreaded Eighth Circle, a place reserved for sowers of scandal and schismatics. The great fortress of Acre had fallen in , and with it the neighboring Frankish possessions of Tyre, Sidon, and Beruit, among others.

By the early sixteenth century, the intellectual weapons forged in earlier centuries had become the tools monks and bards employed to describe this strange, intrusive force that threatened Europe. And the attacks were similar to those used against Jews, heretics, Tartars, and pagans—most indistinguishable from one another. Behind this effort was a primarily domestic intent, the desire of European popes and kings to keep local populations religiously and politically in place.

The steady presence of Islam, especially in the Mediterranean and in the Balkans during these centuries, posed a conundrum for Western Christians. Yet religiously, it remained a subject of constant attacks as heresy, a schism, and a deformed version of Christianity. Still, it remained a thriving presence, disputing Christianity on its central doctrines and offering a clear but demanding morality and prayer life to its adherents.

Across the centuries, there were subtle changes in the contours of Western imagery about Islam. By the early sixteenth century, several Western leaders, including those in commerce, statecraft, and religion, seemed aware of an expanding world whose geography, peoples, beliefs, and commercial possibilities were vastly different from those of earlier times. Soon there would emerge suggestions that Islam might be an understandable religion separate from Christianity, that its founder might not be totally depraved, and that the response to it should be something other than total warfare.

Like it or not, Islam was here to stay. The Ottoman Empire gradually receded in military importance, and Islam ceased to be a direct threat to continental Europe. Military confrontation turned into a diplomatic chess game, an attempt to balance shifting Ottoman-European alliances—a deft game at which the Turks were adroit players.

Meanwhile, the Catholic religion had lost much of its political hold in a changing Europe, where the Holy Roman Empire gave way to new nation-states and emerging Protestantism. A subtle shift in spiritual geography took place in these centuries, matching the changing political landscape.

• Ware verhale van vergifnis: Loop die pad na herstel (Afrikaans Edition).
• Department of Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies?
• Refine your editions:.
• How The Humor Died;
• The sum of all heresies : the image of Islam in Western thought / Frederick Quinn - Details - Trove.
• Global navigation.

Western interest in the Middle East lost much of its earlier religious hostility. A handful of isolated translators of Arabic manuscripts in scattered continental and European universities produced works in European languages, many of them isolated documents from a longdistant past. And among playwrights and musicians, Islam was the frequently employed exotic setting for tragedy or comedy.

And, necessarily, an object: Most participants understandably employed a Christian perspective, but still the comparative study of other religions was launched. Pierre Bayle — , at different times either a Protestant or a Catholic, was a leading voice for such tolerance. A state would be strengthened by extending tolerance to all religions within its borders, Bayle believed. The emergence of new nation-states among the monarchies of France and England caused political theorists to view Islam with the curiosity of early political reformers, suggesting new ideas for governance in Europe under the guise of reporting on the habits of Turks, Persians, or Moors, as has been said, while avoiding the scrutiny of censors.

But change in attitudes toward Islam came slowly. Prisoners were buried waist-deep in the earth and were the targets of Muslim bowmen. Knolle, like earlier Western writers, called Islam the work of Satan and Muhammad a false prophet. But—here is the difference—Knolle also acknowledged Turkish determination, courage, and frugality.

His twelvehundred-page work, written over twelve years, was a harbinger of other accounts that gradually found positive information to share about Muslims, until then considered mortal enemies. The youthful Murad assumed the Ottoman throne in , had his Grand Vizer beheaded, three brothers killed, and numerous political and military opponents strangled or slaughtered. Machiavelli separated the study of politics from theology and described how political societies actually functioned.

Machiavelli also included brief analytical comments about Turkish authoritarian government among other types of government modeled in chapters 4 and Machiavelli gave few details about Turkish politics, and his brief remarks about the sultan could have applied to numerous other authoritarian leaders as well. At the same time, he laid out the rudiments of looking at history not as a branch of religion but rather as a humanistic discipline in its own right. France, both by nature and geography, had a special capacity for governance, he believed. All of the traditional ingredients constituting the Orient were there—wise rulers, proverbspouting elders, amorous exploits, tales of the seraglio, and brutal tyrants and their powerful armies.

Such works provided French audiences with an elaborate and contradictory picture of Middle Eastern life and customs. These works recognized that what had been lumped together as Saracens were numerous peoples, including Turks, Persians, Arabs, Egyptians, and Moors. Geographic boundaries were blurred, but such accounts provided increasingly rich detail about geography and life in various places. But once the dross was 60 the sum of all heresies screened out, a considerable body of accurate information on Islam and the people of the Middle East emerged.

Increasingly, French travel writers were complimentary toward the Muslim lands they visited. There were problems, though; France had active alliances with the Ottoman Empire and was engaged in warfare with its Christian Spanish neighbor. There remained the question of how Christian France, daughter of the church, could enter into an active alliance with the Turks.

Moreover, he said, Christians were allowed to practice their religion freely in Turkey, and although the Ottoman Empire occupied the Christian holy places, pilgrims were allowed to visit them each year. The novel, on which her author-brother George may have collaborated, was a Turkish-Christian cliff-hanger.

Ibrahim, a Christian prince, was named a pasha at the court of Sultan Soliman in Constantinople. Ibrahim hoped to marry Isabelle Grimaldi, like him from Monaco. The long work ended surprisingly: And when the plot faltered, as it did periodically, the author resorted to elaborate descriptions of ceremonies, the palace, and the seraglio. Next, Sultan Soliman arrived, resplendent in elaborate jewel-bedecked cloak and turban, riding a horse whose harness was covered with emeralds and rubies. Meanwhile, frenzied dervishes danced, and the extravaganza ended with a mock battle between Persians and Turks, which the latter won handily.

Shah-Sephi was equated with Louis XV, vizars were cabinet ministers, and fakirs and imams were Catholic clergy in Oriental dress. It is all very well to say that the toleration of several creeds in a state is contrary to the interests of the sovereign. Though all the sects in the world were gathered under his dominion, it would not do him any harm; for there is not a single one of them in which the duties of obedience and submission are not ordained and preached. I acknowledge that history is full of religious wars; but it is an indisputable fact that these wars have not been produced by the multiplicity of religions, but rather by the intolerance of the dominant creed.

Turkey was the model of the latter. Writing in the same period as Montesquieu, Voltaire — had the same purpose as Montesquieu in his scattered writings about Islam: The play was produced in Paris in , but Catholic critics sought to have it banned. In one scene, the Prophet surveyed world history.

Persia was in a weakened state, India in slavery, Egypt in disorder. Now was the time to lead the Arab world to victory. See who Mahomet is. We are alone; now listen: I am ambitious; all men are, we cannot doubt; But never has a king, a pontiff, a chieftain or a citizen, Conceived a project as great as mine. The time of Araby has come at last. This generous people, too long known, Has let its glory be entombed within its deserts; Now the days marked out for victory are at hand.

Do not reproach me with deceiving my native land; I am destroying its weakness and its idolatry. Beneath one king, beneath one God, I come to reunite it, And to make it renowned it must be made to serve. The Prophet remained a driven fanatic, but Islam as a religious system demonstrated a tolerance and adaptability missing in its earlier years. Voltaire had carefully calculated praise for Muhammad—his eloquence, air of authority, and knowledge of his people. He compared Koranic passages of soaring literary and spiritual beauty with those containing contradictions and absurdities, and concluded that Muhammad was an imposter.

Muhammad was both an impressive leader and a self-deceived zealot. Candide and companions, their travels and adventures over now, settled nearby where they worked the soil and snacked on 64 the sum of all heresies preserved fruits and pistachio nuts. Such comments as Voltaire made about Islam, despite their negative aspects, by mid-eighteenth century represented a considerable advance over what had gone before.

Translations of the Koran and a More Detailed Study of Islam It was during this time that a more detailed study of Islam began in earnest, primarily through the study of languages. He was also busily adding manuscripts and coins to his growing collection, although he never visited the Orient and knew none of its languages. Widespread prejudice against Islam and Arabic existed as well. Bedwell studied Semitic languages, with a special interest in Arabic, at Cambridge in the s, even though it was not formally taught. He gained the support of Lancelot Andrewes, then a fellow of Pembroke Hall, who both included Arabic among the many languages he knew and promoted its study as a way of learning more about the early church.

Andrewes, later bishop of Chichester, Ely, and Winchester, found Bedwell various clerical positions, where the latter pursued his multiple interests in mathematics, logic, and languages. Bedwell made one trip abroad, to Holland in The other type set was in Rome, used by the Vatican to publish parts of the Bible for missionaries to distribute in the Middle East. Much of his life was spent meticulously preparing a nine-volume Arabic dictionary that never appeared in print during his lifetime, and by the time of his death was obsolete.

From to Pococke lived in Constantinople, where he was chaplain to the English ambassador, and continued his language studies and manuscript collecting. It represented a compilation of such impressions of Islamic history and religion as Pococke could assemble. The author also published a translation of an Anglican catechism in and a shortened version of the Book of Common Prayer in At that time medical students were nominally required to study Arabic because of the Arabic contribution to science. After his death, the Bodleian Library acquired his manuscript collection of works in Arabic, Hebrew, and other languages.

Pococke treated Arabic as a dead language and Islam as ancient history, but he also translated a life of the Prophet from Arabic into English. Collections of documents in Arabic and Persian were gathered in Oxford and Cambridge, and the number of language students grew modestly. Several dictionaries and grammars also appeared in Europe and England, and in a massive Turkish dictionary was published in Austria. Fluent in Turkish, Arabic, and Farsi, he later became the French ambassador to the sultan and compiled an early Turkish grammar in He completed a translation of the Koran in that was soon translated into English, Dutch, German, and Russian.

Ross wrote a preface to the Koran attacking the Puritans, whom he said were already heretics—so how could publishing the Koran corrupt them further? Then he added lurid stories about Muhammad, including a report that Muhammad wore a turban because of a misshapen head. This translation was to be by George Sale ca. His version lasted until the Rodwell translation of , and was reproduced and in wide circulation as late as The French diplomat-linguist also published a Turkish grammar. His freedom from religious prejudice in which respect he compares favorably with many of his nineteenthand twentieth-century successors.

But the complicated mix of seventeenth-century religious thought was not black and white. Others, handy at number symbolism, believed that the Jews would defeat the Romans in , then the Turks in the dates were calculated from the Bible.

The sum of all heresies: the image of Islam in Western thought.

Protestants and Jews would then form an alliance against pope and sultan, for which the Jews would be rewarded with a return to Palestine, after which they would convert to Christianity. Such English expectations were chimerical. Jews had been badly persecuted by Christians, and the likelihood of their jumping at the opportunity for a military alliance with their oppressors was nil. The English promoters of revolt, often called Restorationists, laced their political arguments with biblical quotations and they believed they had found a leader in Sabbatai Sevi — , Jewish leader of a messianic cult.

Create lists, bibliographies and reviews: Search WorldCat Find items in libraries near you. Advanced Search Find a Library. Your list has reached the maximum number of items. Please create a new list with a new name; move some items to a new or existing list; or delete some items. Your request to send this item has been completed. Citations are based on reference standards. However, formatting rules can vary widely between applications and fields of interest or study.

The specific requirements or preferences of your reviewing publisher, classroom teacher, institution or organization should be applied. The E-mail Address es field is required. Please enter recipient e-mail address es. The E-mail Address es you entered is are not in a valid format. Please re-enter recipient e-mail address es. You may send this item to up to five recipients. The name field is required. Please enter your name. The E-mail message field is required. Please enter the message. Please verify that you are not a robot. Would you also like to submit a review for this item?

You already recently rated this item. Your rating has been recorded. Write a review Rate this item: Preview this item Preview this item. The sum of all heresies: